FreeBSD is known to be a very reliable and rock-solid server operating system; You only need to check netcraft.com for systems with the longest uptime, and you’ll notice that in today’s top there are 7 servers running FreeBSD out of the top 10 (stats correct 21/07/08).
Just out of interest, if you run a FreeBSD server, how long has your server been running without reboot? If you have more than 1 servers, let’s know about the server with the longest uptime.

I hesitate to admit this, because what it usually really means is that you have a system in dire need of security patches. :/ But, there’s this:
$ uptime
8:37AM up 1605 days, 18:30, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
$ ls -l /var/run/dmesg.boot
-rw-r–r– 1 root wheel 8781 Feb 27 2004 /var/run/dmesg.boot
several:
1:34PM up 1839 days, 6:56, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
3:07PM up 1180 days, 2:14, 1 user, load averages: 0.04, 0.03, 0.00
:)
At a company I used to work at, we had a site that had a rack of freebsd 4.4 servers (that were only decommissioned late last year!) . They had an uptime of well over 1400 days. The only that didn’t had a hardware failure (the infamous dell 1650 ATI chip problem).
Ahh … makes me all warm inside.
Several running 4.7, heres the uptime of one:
backup01# uptime
4:14PM up 1576 days, 1:24, 1 user, load averages: 1.31, 1.02, 1.04
backup01# uname -r
4.7-RELEASE-p25
backup01# ls -al /var/run/dmesg.boot
-rw-r–r– 1 root wheel 5064 Apr 8 2004 /var/run/dmesg.boot
backup01# grep CPU /var/run/dmesg.boot
CPU: Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon/Celeron (1125.77-MHz 686-class CPU)
SMP: AP CPU #1 Launched!
To be replaced this year with 7.1 :(
FreeBSD sip1.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 5.5-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.5-RELEASE #1: Tue May 30 10:49:49 CEST 2006 mike@sip1.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX:/usr/src/sys/i386/compile/SIP1 i386
3:38PM up 1264 days, 1:42, 1 user, load averages: 0.05, 0.14, 0.19
Indeed this machine was pretty busy all this years.
Processed over 27 terabytes of traffic for all this time
ipfw show
…. skip …
65535 33437342356 27054437965501 allow ip from any to any